Wednesday, July 1, 1998

Q&A: Doris Lessing

The creative dark. Incommunicable. And what about the pages
discarded and thrown away, the stories that were misbegotten -- into the
waste-paper basket, the ideas that lived in your mind for a day or two, or a
week, but haven't any life, so out with them. What life, what is it, why is one
page alive and another not, what is this aliveness, which is born so very deep,
out of sight, fed by love?

"Walking in the Shade"

HB: You know that
Stephen King movie in which a woman kidnaps the writer and keeps him holed up
as her own private novelist? Well, if this were a Stephen King movie and I
could kidnap one novelist and keep her working for me it would be you.

DL: Really!?!?

HB: Yes. I love
being in the company of your novels. You chronicle the zeitgeist like no one
else.

DL: I didn't set
out to do it. I found that I was doing it. I must be on some wavelength or
other, I don't know which. It's true I find often I have written about things
that then happen.

HB: You've also
contributed to the zeitgeist. You're a writer who's had a lot of influence on
people's lives.

DL: Couldn't that
be exaggerated? You know, when people come to me and say, your books have
changed my life, I think, hang on a minute. If you weren't ready to change, a
single writer couldn't have changed you. This is a time of great change. What a
tumult we live through!

HB: Rereading
"The Golden Notebook", I noticed that the changes you chronicle
happened earlier than I thought they did. In the United States we had the Beats
and then the huge counterculture in the late 60s but you're describing
something that took place in England . . .

DL: In the 50s.
It is now a belief that everything started in the 60s. Well, it didn't, you
see. A lot of the things that we think started in the 60s started in the 50s,
in fact. One of the things that was supposed to have started was the women's
movement. But from the time I became political, which was about age 24, we sat
around discussing women's issues. It didn't begin in the 60s at all.

HB: So you push
it back earlier, unless England and the United States are different.

DL: No. The big
difference between Europe and the United States is Communism. You had a little
tight beleaguered Communist Party here, very very paranoid and always, because
of this, much more dogmatic and ideological than its counterparts in Europe.

HB: I don't think
of England as a country that had a huge Communist movement.

DL: No, but look
at Europe as a whole. For quite a few years I never met anybody who wasn't
Communist or hadn't been a Communist.

HB: What a great
paradox it must have been to have a group of people, the Communists, mouthing
the most idealistic slogans about humanity but corrupt to their core.

DL: They weren't
personally corrupt. Their beliefs were stupid. I'm not talking about Communist
Party bosses; in most countries they were corrupt. The average Party member was
usually a terribly decent citizen. But the belief was so stupid. Now you can't
believe it -- what we all believed.

HB: You're very
attuned to how what seemed eternal all of a sudden seems ridiculous.

DL: It
disappears.

HB: And there's
shock.

DL: I don't know
if this is the right place for this great statement but looking back it seems
to me a tragedy that we identified with the Soviet Union, which was by
definition a failure, corrupt, and lied all the time. So the entire Left was
always talking about the Soviet Union or defending it, identifying with
failure. The Soviet Union had nothing to with us, in fact. We could just as
well have pursued our own aims in Europe without reference to it. If we'd done
that, socialism would not now be a dead issue.

Does that make sense?

HB: Perfect
sense. On the other hand, it's hard to think of a Europe that wasn't shaped in
that way.

DL: I know but
sometimes you dream a little. I suppose somewhere I have a hankering after the
old socialist dream.

HB: Now we're
post-left. Both the Old and New Lefts are over.

DL: Well, it
seems to me the successor to Communism is political correctness -- the terrible
dogmatism, the intolerance. Movements get taken over by the hysterics,
unfortunately.

HB: All mass
movements?

DL: I do think
so. It's a great pity.

HB: You write
about the dream of progress that runs through the 20th century and say it was
one of: "grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the
sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state;
passionate dreams of utopia and wonderland and perfect cities; attempts at
communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes . . .
"

Then you speculate that dream is coming, mercifully, to an
end. I would just want to suggest there might be one aspect of the zeitgeist
you don't see -- it may be less visible in England, but is going strong in the
United States, particularly in places like Cambridge -- and that is the dream
of the digital utopia.

DL: I'm not
entitled to talk about it because I'm not in tune with it. But what I feel is
we are always running after our own inventions. We invent the most amazing
things, and then try and catch up with them. As I'm sure I don't have to tell
you, all the computers are going to be in state of crisis at the turn of
millennium. We didn't foresee this. We are a terribly careless lot of people.

We keep inventing things all the times and we don't know
what the glitch is going to be. It's as if we're on some helter-skelter. We
hardly have time to catch up with ourselves.

HB: You did a
piece for The Guardian called "Between the fax and the Fiction" in
which you wrote: "It is for the next scientific discovery that we all
wait, as once they did for the last chapter of a Dickens novel, with a
cliff-hanger to keep us guessing until next time."

DL: It's not that
I'm not madly in love with the novel and with literature, because I am, but
where do we actually wait for news? It's from the scientists, and it's always
so marvelous and extraordinary, and opens whole horizons. Look at this new star
they've just discovered! What a thrill. Every day it seems that extraordinary
new horizons widen and widen.

HB: You're always
wrestling with the role of the novel. There's the letter, reproduced in
"Walking in the Shade," that you wrote to E.P. Thompson in which you
talk about the need for information, and ask what role the novel has in
supplying it.

DL: One of the
roles of the novel that's hardly noticed is that it informs us about new kinds
of people or new ways of living or new places. Try and imagine not having the
novel; we would be very ignorant. If you're now going to say all that stuff is
on television and on the Internet, well, I don't think it is. You don't really
get the feeling of a place anywhere except in a novel, not the real feeling.

HB: You say that
for the most part reading novels is no different than reading journalism, and
that only very few of the novels you read are novels in some other sense.

DL: True, only a
few; there are a few great novels which are in a different realm altogether.
But you can read novels for lots of different reasons. I read lots of not
terribly good novels for information. There is a whole range of Third World
novels which are not necessarily very good but teach you an enormous amount
about the countries they come from.

HB: There's now a
good deal of attention to writers from around the British Commonwealth. Having grown
up in Africa, do you feel you are in that category?

DL: Yes, I do.
I'm extremely lucky. Both my parents were quite excessively British. I have
that as absolute bedrock. But I also have the other eye because I was brought
up outside England. You couldn't have a luckier combination.

HB: You're also
open to science fiction, and write about how parochial literary fiction is by
comparison.

DL: Well, some of
it. In England we have, as you probably know, the perennial English novel
-- extremely good, wonderful, sensitive novels. And they come out every
year and are suffocating as far as I'm concerned with their tight little
horizons.

HB: You got
savaged when you started writing your series of science fiction novels. John
Leonard, in the New York Times, wrote about "The Making of the
Representative for Planet 8," that, "One of the many sins for which
the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs.
Lessing. . . . She now propagandizes on behalf of our insignificance in the
cosmic razzmatazz."

He felt you had ceased to care.

DL: What they
didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction
of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like
"Blood Music," by Greg Bear. He's a great writer.

HB: I think
you're one of the most important writers of the last half-century and it's
extraordinary to me that you haven't won a Nobel Prize. I assume they have
quotas -- time to recognize Jewish-American literature, time for Egyptian,
African, Asian literature.

DL: They've got
an Italian this time. From what they say about him, he sounds a very good
choice.

HB: He might be
wonderful but it seems absurd that they've managed to act as if you hadn't been
writing for the last fifty years.

DL: Well, it
doesn't do to worry about this kind of thing.

HB: I knew you
would take that sort of tone about it.

DL: Also you do
discover how enormously parochial we are. I hadn't heard of this marvelous
Egyptian writer, who won the prize. Now I've been reading him, and he's
wonderful.

HB: Still, it
seems you're invisible in some way.

DL: I am, yes.

HB: Maybe because
you're so hard to classify.

DL: It's also
partly because there are good women writers who are invisible. One is Christina
Stead. Have you ever read her? She's a marvelous writer. But she's invisible.
In fact, Saul Bellow said, when he got the Nobel Prize, that it should have
gone to Christina Stead. Try "The Man Who Loved Children." There's a
great treat in store for you.

DL: Well, I think
it's a bit heartbreaking. My heart was breaking when I wrote it. Thank God
that's over.

HB: It's
heartbreaking because of what's being described and also because of how
beautifully it is written. Unlike, say, "The Golden Notebook,
" which is shattering in its own way -- it's as if you feel you
haven't done your job if you don't shake readers to their core -- "Love,
Again" is not about chronicling the zeitgeist.

DL: No, it's not
the zeitgeist.

HB: There are
times in your work when you use a raw approach, as if you are saying, this is
raw, uncooked, almost documentary material. In the "Walking in the
Shade," you frequently say something like, "and then this happened."
Most writers wouldn't say something so plain as "then this happened."
They'd perform some pirouette to get the reader from one place to another.

But "Love, Again", by contrast, is lyrical; it's
an enormously lyrical book.

DL: I actually
have a little theory on that. The theory is that romantic love of the classical
kind and severe clinical depression can be linked with childhood miseries.
There's a nexus there, which I try to bring out in the character of Stephen.
Remember Stephen in the book, the one who was in love with the dead woman? In
real life, he was a minor aristocrat who was in love with his great aunt, who
was dead. Now if someone tells you he is in love with his great aunt, you
laugh, don't you? But the man was obsessed, and in due course, killed himself.
So what was all that about, I ask you?

HB: You allude to
Sarah's childhood in "Love, Again," which she would prefer not to
fully remember

DL: There are
some ironies there. Sarah, who was the unloved one, was the much better human
being than her brother, who was a monster. He was the favorite.

HB: It's a nicely
structured book, too, framed by the troubadours and theater.

DL: Have you ever
worked in the theater?

HB: No.

DL: Well, it can
sometimes be as if the entire process is enchanted. There's a kind of
collective trance going on. And then people wake up.

HB: In "The
Golden Notebook "there's a kind of stasis. People can no longer go
forward. There's no way through. So instead of breakthrough, you get breakdown.

DL: In the second
half of the fifties, what I was observing with the one hundred and fifty
percenters was that they break down. Their entire beings were involved with
Communism, like a religion. And suddenly the whole thing turned out to be a
dream. They broke down, they went crazy. They also, not surprisingly, had
religious conversions, which may be the same thing. Or they turned into their
own opposites and became ruthless businessmen.

HB: You see the
breakdown as in some ways refreshing, as in the case of Anna, the main
character.

DL: Some people
are much improved by it.

HB: Anna -- I'm
tempted to say Molly because in your books there's almost always a Molly in the
works -- fills her walls with cut-outs from the news. She's plastered to the
zeitgeist.

DL: I wrote that
and heard some months later about a man who was actually doing. Every inch of
the walls of his apartment was covered with newspaper. He went completely mad,
not surprisingly.

HB: You've
written, "I don't believe that I have a thought. There is a thought
around." When Anna breaks down in "The Golden Notebook" she has
all these people in her head. Not only do ideas enter her head, but so do
personae, and she has to live with all of them, as so does her lover, Saul
Green, aka Clancy Sigal.

DL : Clancy wrote
a novel in which I was a main character. I never read it. You know, it's great
mistake to read these pieces. You get cross and think that was untrue and get
into polemics. What's the point of it?

I know nobody believes me. When I say I haven't read this
novel of his, people get a very ironical look, but the fact is I haven't. On
purpose.

HB: He wrote a
piece for the Times about living with you, and what it was like to be a writer
living with another writer.

DL: Oh, it's not
a good idea. You know, Clancy's a very fast writer, and a brilliant observer.
He wrote brilliant journalism. Try a little book called "Weekend In
Dinlock" about a short stay in a mining village. It's brilliant. I'm
always amazed he's not given credit for it.

HB: In
"Prisons We Choose to Live Inside," you talk about the social
sciences bringing us knowledge of ourselves, not very flattering information
about how we actually behave. You say we should attend to this information,
find a way of using it. But you don't say how.

DL: The more we
know about ourselves, the more we can choose how to behave. There was a chap in
Canada -- and I'm going to leave it vague because nobody really approves of
this kind of research -- who used brainwashing techniques. He would take, say,
a Seventh Day Adventist and make this person a Roman Catholic, then two days
later change the set of beliefs again into, oh, I don't know, Jewish, then
later make the person a follower of Ian Paisley, and at the end of the time
would turn this person back to the original set of beliefs.

Now this seems to me an original piece of research we have
chosen not to notice. What does that say about beliefs? What does it say about
us? Doesn't it strike you as something we might pay attention to?

HB: But how do we
use this kind of information?

DL: Let us say we
now decide to set up a little group or movement to do something or other.
There's a lot of information about the dynamics of groups. They nearly always
develop leadership problems. They very often split in certain recognized ways.
None of them ever end up where they were supposed to. Why doesn't anyone say,
this is likely to happen so how do we stop it? How do we recognize a mad power
lover who's using the words of idealism and doesn't even know he's a power
lover? We could actually start thinking instead of emoting.

HB: Some of your
writing works like that, like a probe: let's see how this situation or that
group of people work. There's an experimental aspect to it.

DL: Yes, I think
so. When I write I am all the time amazed at what I'm thinking, amazed at what
I learn because I've been too lazy to think it before.

HB: You've
written about the Sufis, and what you emphasize is their attention to the
zeitgeist, their dispassionate look at what is possible for human beings at a
given time and place.

DL: There's a bit
I quote at the beginning of "Walking in the Shade" where Idries Shah
points out that until we understand what makes us tick, we're not going to
change. He puts it more eloquently. What I admire about the Sufis, apart from
any other dimension that they have, is the extraordinary sharpness. Idries Shah
had the sharpest, most critical mind of anyone I've ever known. Listening to
him talk for an hour, your brain used to rock with his comments on society and
the world. Incredibly acute and I admired that. He died, you know.

HB: In
"Walking in the Shade" you allude to the easy dismissal of religion,
that takes no effort or thought. But now religious fundamentalism is a very
powerful force. And it does cost something to oppose it.

DL: You'd never
believe, when I was young, we genuinely believed religious wars were over. We'd
say, at least it's impossible to have a religious war now. Can you believe
that?

HB: In a piece
you wrote in 1992, you said, "I am sure that millions of people, the rug
of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps
not even knowing it, for another dogma." Don't you think religion and
nationalism have entered to fill the void almost immediately?

DL: And political
correctness, which has an appalling effect on academic life. Universities are
being ruined by it. Freedom of thought has been destroyed. And that is bigotry.

I'm so afraid of religion. Its capacity for murder is
terrifying.

HB: Last
question. There's a poem in "Love, Again," an exquisite poem, and I
wondered where it came from: